Bitcoin Forum

Crossing Our Desk:

–Who’s afraid of the People’s Bank of China? Not Danny Deng, it seems. The founder of 798 Satoshi Square, a bitcoin informational and meetup site  in Beijing’s art district, has teamed up with Robocoin to give mainland China its first two-way bitcoin ATM.

Ever since  the PBOC blocked banks from servicing digital-currency exchanges last month, regulatory guidelines in China have been vague. As such, Mr. Deng’s service will at this stage likely be restricted to demonstration purposes only, says Robocoin chief executive officer Jordan Kelley.

“They’re really treating this as, ‘let’s go out, let’s introduce this, let’s show how compliant it can be, and we’ll see what happens,’” Mr. Kelley said.

Within the 1,000-foot space of 798 Satoshi Square, “they can control the environment, and make sure it doesn’t get out of control.”

BTC China, the big Chinese digital-currency exchange, in April installed a one-way ATM in a mall in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang technology park.

If nothing else, the move suggests China’s many bitcoin enthusiasts aren’t giving up. They know that the government has not banned bitcoin itself and presumably are buying into the argument that Beijing wants to control, not kill, the growth of cryptocurrencies.

After all, as we wrote last week, China’s e-commerce-driven population is already a long way ahead of other places in the use of digital money. It’s something the government will ultimately find very difficult to clamp down on. (Michael Casey)

-WedBush Securities analysts Gil Luria and Aaron Turner make some big claims about cryptocurrencies’ potential for economic disruption in their latest take on bitcoin’s future.

In a report entitled “Timing and Sizing the Era of Bitcoin,” Messrs. Luria and Turner argue that “bitcoin-related technologies will disrupt payments markets and other trust-based markets within the next few years and for decades to follow.”

How much disruption? “Substantial,” the Wedbush analysts say, “considering 20% of U.S. GDP is generated by industries whose main function is as a trusted third party.”

That’s a big statement. They’re referring to a host of new innovations – smart contracts that need no lawyer, IPOs that need no underwriter, real estate transactions that need no broker – which use decentralized cryptocurrency-based systems of verification instead of trust-based agency services. The upshot is that the jobs of lawyers, bankers, insurance agents and countless other such “trusted third-party” middlemen are potentially on the line.

Meanwhile, efficient bitcoin-based payment processing stands to cut deeply into U.S. banks’ fee revenue, which runs to $250 billion a year, and into global payments-related revenues, which exceed $300 billion a year, they wrote.

Messrs. Luria and Turner also see big opportunities for automated digital-currency payments in the so-called “Internet of Things.” The way they see it, devices and gadgets that communicate with each other will also make payments to each other with bitcoin or some other digital currency.

One early “machine-to-machine” application they foresee would be the use of bitcoin-based technology to ward off distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks on computer networks. Mr. Luria explained that smart network technology could be used to detect when an  entity wants to use large amounts of a network’s resources and charge it for the privilege, creating a powerful disincentive for malevolent DDOS attackers to ply their trade. (Michael Casey)